Understanding and Addressing Adult sexual Attraction to Children: A Study of Paedophiles in Contemporary society

It's a research study kind of reading experience. Nothing transformational if you have some background on the subject. Was hoping for more ... found the price for the size of the book and info provided lacking some. Just okay.

This book opened my eyes. I'm glad it was written. I'd like to see pedophiles able to communicate to stop an offense before it occurs. It's my opinion that society's approach to this is not helping. We need to do things differently. This book offers fresh insight into the mind of pedophiles and practical ways in which our communities can approach this subject in ways that might actually do some good.

This book has some useful info in it. She is not overly judgemental and the book is well researched.She indicates there is a lot of taboo concerning pedophilia, they don't seem to even want research done on the subject.That is too bad, we need that info to educate councilors.

Sarah Goode provides an interesting treatise of this difficult subject. She details her work with many self-identified individuals who have a sexual attraction to children. It offers an insight into the world of some individuals who have a sexual attraction to children, beyond the common study of convicted pedophiles in prisons.

This text is as provocative (even if it doesn't wish to titillate) as it is pertinent, offering innovative and necessary insights into the lives of people who participate in online paedophile subcultures. It is a courageous and thoughtful text, recommended for lay people, academics, and professionals involved with child welfare and/or sexual cultures and/or sexual offenders. Dr. Goode gives a very clear synopsis of how paedophilia is understood in contemporary culture. The dominant view conceptualises paedophilia in terms of pathology but Goode makes a good case as to why thinking about adult sexual attraction to children in only forensic terms is likely to give a distorted picture of paedophilia in society. Accordingly, she undertook a series of online interactions with a number of paedophiles between 2006-2008. The project, known as the MAA Daily Lives Research Project, had a sample of fifty-six respondents (all except two were male), who participated in a questionnaire (and in some cases maintained significant email contact), asking a relatively broad range of questions about sexuality and sexual identity. Her research elicited responses that suggest that life a 'minor attracted adult' is a rather melancholy experience. Accordingly, issues relating to offline/online support and media representation/interaction are salient. One of the virtues of this book is the amount of space that's given to the responses given by the research participants. While this could potentially seem off-putting to some readers, I think it's very important that this data is shared in order to give the reader an intimate sense of their opinion. Unsurprisingly, one gets the impression that participants were quite eager to offer their opinions, in no small detail, in proportion to their feelings of alienation from mainstream society. Some of the testimonies are quite poignant. For example, the account written on pp.5-9? Read it out aloud to a friend as though it is your confession. It's tough not to empathise with someone in such crippling distress. It's important for society to understand these sorts of feelings in order to develop better ways of understanding how sexual desire, preference and identity relate to lifestyle (particularly when this lifestyle has the potential to lead to actions that may be harmful in different ways). Goode situates paedophile communities within the context of other forms of online interactions that are associated with adult sexual attraction to children (e.g. the trading of child pornography and the 'lolicon' phenomenon), and the contentiousness of these forms of participation are highlighted. These issues fit nicely into broader issues of ethics in relation to both fantasy and the sexual abuse of children. A key finding of the study is that, "there is no monolithic, homogenous 'view' held by all paedophiles" in relation to sexual attraction to children (p.136). Whilst this finding could be inferred by research taken into many studies of subculture/diaspora/ethnicity etc. (Would it be rational to assume that paedophiles are really so monstrous that they all think alike?), it is quite significant to have some empirical data to support this view, as it ought to affect the way in which paedophilia and paedophiles are conceptualised by society and social services. Goode attempts to put the background and findings of the research into the context of child protection as this is something of broad social relevance, whilst also reflected in the questions asked of the research participants. Goode contextualises the current approach to child protection, suggesting that, "paedophiles cannot be excised from our culture...There is no separation between them and us. Instead, we are all entangle together, the abusers with the abused, the innocent with the complicit" (p.188). This is not to suggest that Goode is advocating the 'normalisation' (as in tolerance) of paedophilia. Rather, she's rationalising the development of understanding paedophilia within the scope of the recognition of the rights of women and children. Whilst Goode isn't promoting paedophilia in any terms, she's realistic enough to realise that when paedophiles are disconnected from a network of intimate relations that allow someone to feel support, and strengthen their sense of agency; it is ultimately to everyone's expense. Overall, I think this book makes a very important contribution to the field. It enables the reader to gain a sense of paedophilia on the world wide web (dispelling the notion that paedophile interactions, particularly paedophile activism and support groups, necessarily take place in shadier areas of the Internet). This research is so valuable because of the scarcity of this aspect of paedophilia on the Internet (other books tend to focus upon child pornography and sexual grooming). Recommended.

Excellent. Dr Goode is excellent.

Before 1948, the annus mirabilis of the Homophile Movement, you could publish nothing favorable or even neutral about homosexuality in the good ole USA. In that year came Kinsey, Vidal, and the Bachelors for Wallace, out of which grew Mattachine. It organized the first ever petition, demonstration, parade, case that dismissed charges of lewd behavior, college level courses, and our first ever magazine. One, which after a two year struggle won in 1958 from the U.S. Supreme Court the right to be distributed by the U.S. Post Office, and thus blazed the way.Today, just as about homosexuality before 1948, you can't publish anything even neutral, much less positive, about pederasty -- now conflated with pedophilia, and demonized (as witchcraft was by the Inquisition and communism by Joe McCarthy). At long last, the Roman Catholics, traumatized by the priest sex scandal, which just now even penumbrating His Holiness the Pope himself, are trying to distinguish the two: pederasty being with adolescents and pedophilia, supposedly much more damnable, with prepubescents. Three brave but demonized women have succeeded in publishing studies of intergenerational sex which are not so extremely negative: Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), The Trauma Myth by Susan Clancy (Basic Books, 2009), and Understanding and Addressing Adult Sexual Attraction To Children: A Study of Paedophiles In Contemporary Society by Sarah Goode (Routledge, 2009).Questioning and interviewing fifty six willing adults (54 males, 2 females) attracted to minors, Goode arrived at virtually the same conclusions that Susan Clancy, who interviewed in contrast the prepubescent victims after they reached adulthood, namely that the younger partners were not necessarily immediately traumatized. Like Clancy, Goode got her data from people who were not undergoing prosecution or treatment. Both of these women, coming from opposite directions, concluded that the mantra of the child sex abuse industry demonizing all adults involved in intergenerational sex, with pedophiles lumped together with pederasts were wrong and we were inspired in part by selfish gain. Thus, like Levine's Harmful to Minors (2002), Goode's is an essentially fine piece of research, but it hardly goes beyond Rind's "Meta-Analytic Examination Of Assumed Properties Of Child Sexual Abuse" (1998), which unlike these other studies is limited to male-male. Unlike Rind, the three women all condemn such relations as immoral because they supposedly infringe the right of those under 18 to make informed consent. The damage is not physical or psychological, but, according to Clancy and Goode, moral. Unlike mainstream coverage, based mainly on those undergoing prosecution or treatment, Goode concluded that there is a great variety among adults attracted to minors, and not all are monsters who should be eliminated from society.Goode acknowledged that there is not necessarily universal harm of any sort, even when prepubescents are involved, but insists, nevertheless, that without out any demonstrable harm, intergenerational sexuality with those under 18 should be, like Clancy holds, prohibited because it violates the "child's" right -- due to their inability and incapacity -- really to thoroughly consent to sex. Unlike Clancy's, Goode's book is less well written and suffers from its origin as a doctoral dissertation and its overly long title.Goode categorically denied that people should be vilified because of what they are rather than what they do, and thus in my opinion helps to deconstructed the monster myth.While Goode regularly gets vilified in the mainstream media for allegedly being soft on pedophiles, e.g. [...], Richard Yuill, unlike me an expert in this field, has remarked, that Goode does not go far enough in fostering the understanding she has developed about this population."In a recent ethnographic study on paedophiles in contemporary society, Sarah Goode certainly recognises the lowly position of self-identified child lovers within contemporary Western society, yet fails to fully theorise the implications of this when it comes to core epistemological issues of knowledge production, scientific veracity, and what cultural stories are able to be disseminated," wrote Yuill in an email to me. "The central reason for this oversight is her naive adoption of an essentialist perspective on adult-child sexual relations and subsequent failure to engage with constructionist and deconstructionist insights on childhood.""Furthermore, the attitude Goode displays to her research respondents is far from empathetic or ethical. Indeed, most of her final summation amounts to a rubbishing of the "supposed" positions taken by self-identified paedophiles, and tends to take the form of a self-congratulatory monologue on how convincing she finds the child sexual abuse (CSA) paradigm in her understanding of adult-child sexual relationships. Goode also doesn't hide her complicity in current legal strictures on paedophiles, by openly declaring her intent to contact the police, and in positioning her work as an important tool in "child protection.""Her basically unreconstructed modernist approach to sexual epistemology ultimately fails to provide significant theoretical or practical insights. In contrast, Goode's reliance on developmental and neurophysiological approaches lead her down a blind alley, one which supposedly presents a liberal notion of progressive toleration, but in fact ultimately binds sexual theory and praxis to a bureaucratic, monolithic regimen, and consigns both paedophiles and children to a sinister and dystopian future. "Other major studies, but only in of male-to-male intergenerational sex, which actually tried to justify it in most cases, still remain unpublished. Bruce Rind et. al., "A meta-analytic examination of assumed properties of child sexual abuse (CSA) using college samples," in Psychological Bulletin (1998) was, after a hysterical media outrage, unamimously condemned by both houses of Congress, but he since has written a far longer and deeper comprehensive defense and, independently, Richard Yuill's Ph.D. thesis, Male Age Discrepant Intergenerational Sexualities and Relationships (2005), a dissertation carefully supervised at the University of Glasgow, is also yet to be published. Rind's is a more nuanced work (with attached appraisals by other and his own rejoinders to them) is, in my opinion, a masterpiece. Another gripping and very well written pertinent study that some fans are desperately trying to suppress is the in press book Michael Jackson's Dangerous Liaisons by Carl Toms. Male-to-male is still the most condemned type of intergenerational sex, (as in the priest "scandal"), a holdover from homophobia, but less than half as frequent as male-female intergenerational sex, and both are less frequent than female-to-female (which often just amounts to cuddling or petting without penetration or climax, which therefore makes it hard to assess or enumerate) and female-to-male, which was formally praised as making a man out of the boy until not so long ago!

This was a fascinating read. Sarah Goode gives a voice to and therefore humanises people who are sexually attracted to children. This is perhaps the most unfortunate sexuality because it is forbidden to do anything about it except masturbating to fantasy or child model photographs. I felt that the weakest part of the book however was on the subject of 'child sex abuse'. The author writes that 'adult sexual contact with children is harmful because of the developmental processes which the child is still undergoing. Child development is a subject we still have much to learn about... I suggest that the harm caused by adult sexual contact with children is fundamentally related to psychological intrusion and the violation of intimacy... It coerces the child into something which is invasive and intrusive, an intimacy which the child has as yet no developmental boundaries to protect against... The child's autonomy and self-determination are violated... The child's first experience of a sexual relationship becomes a coerced experience, deeply embedded and re-experienced within the child's body and mind'. The frustrating aspect of this is that it may all be perfectly true but here it is all assertion and suggestion rather than based on critical evidence-based research. To be fair this was not the aspect of the topic she was researching but unless we know how the concept of 'child sex abuse' is evidenced and constructed it is difficult evaluate her recommendations for what should be done about it. If anyone knows of any good critical books on this aspect please let me know.

What a brave and intelligent book. In a society that tends to react hysterically to sexual behaviour with children in the press and ignore it in our own streets and houses, an author who is prepared to engage with the subject in such a humane and balanced way is to be congratulated. I am grateful to Dr Goode for daring to shine a sane, compassionate light on this subject whilst also stating openly her own beliefs and opinions. What I find so impressive is her capacity to hold her own feelings, which must have been painful and confusing as she sifted through so much intense and contradictory data, to present it in such a calm, clear voice whilst bringing herself honestly and openly into the book, rather than hiding behind a safe, distant academic voice. Dr Goode makes no secret of the fact that her own beliefs and feelings are as much an influence in the text as those of her research respondents. For me, this is a rare and courageous piece of research and writing, and desperately needed in our effort to understand this difficult aspect of society.

I purchased this by accident when I thought I was going to see an excerpt of the book. I am not sorry that I did! The research that I am doing for a film needs this kind of information. As horrendous as I think this situation may be the very unbiased information that this text book is giving me is helping m to understand the human situation better and at the same time allow me to write a better character.

Read in a breath and will probably keep it st hand. We'd really need more people like Sarah Goode and more open-minded texts like this one.

Purchased this book for information for my research. Found it very helpful!